Dionne Brand’s latest offering, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging is epic in its reach, yet personal in its preoccupations. It relies on both flights of thought and fancy. The author’s blending of theoretical musings and poetic lyricism scrambles the boundary between non-fiction and fiction, conjuring up a groundbreaking hybrid. The result is an intriguing and insightful patchwork comprised of anecdote, story and cultural critique, reflecting the rupture of Black identity brought on by the forced departure from Old World to New.
Brand was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award in 1997 for Land to Light On. Following the success of her most recent novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, as well as another novel and several collections of poetry, Brand has delved into a new genre. I spoke with Brand about the central concerns she explores in her latest work.
The Door of No Return, the central consciousness and metaphor of the book, points to the incalculable loss that has impacted Blacks in the Diaspora. This loss of identity was brought about initially by the effects of slavery in the Americas, and later by a merciful legacy of forgetting seen as necessary in order to heal selves, build communities. As Brand notes, the metaphor of the door was born out of “an act of imagination…They had aptly described it for generations to come, so that we could not mistake its meaning ever.” The door is a place and also a no-place, more than just shut it is haunted by the ache of origins irretrievably lost.
The theme of haunting figures prominently as a recurring motif in the work. Brand is fearless and unsentimental in her exploration of the contours of this unknowable space, situating herself both as critic and subject. In the opening pages of the book, Brand describes a series of futile conversations with her grandfather in which she attempts to discover her tribal origins through him. He can’t tell her because he himself doesn’t know and they part “mutually disappointed.” Brand left her native Trinidad for Canada at 17 with the echo of her question intact.
While the results of this rupture from the past have often served to marginalize Blacks, they may also in Brand’s conception offer a source of creativity and celebration. “I see the haunting of the door as a kind of possibility for an immense extension of the imagination,” Brand suggests enthusiastically. While she acknowledges that many Black communities in the Diaspora are materially deprived, she asserts that “there are also these moments of shared virtuosity.”
The haunting of the door, according to Brand, is also played out on the bodies of Blacks in the Diaspora. She traces the many associations assigned to Black bodies to slavery and its overzealous assigning of physicality and sexuality to Blackness. “It’s also a dangerous body, because it’s a captive body,” Brand explains. ” I think that one tries all the time to reclaim that body when one is a black person. So one tries walking down the street, even as one inhabits the body, one tries to disinhabit it all the time.” She also suggests that these overwhelming associations force many Black people to disassociate from their physical selves. “I do think that people perform masculinity and femininity as we perform blackness—in these extreme ways.”
At the same time, Brand notes an ongoing complicity between Black culture- “what is produced in Black homes, and neighbourhoods, the simplest exchanges in communities”—and its commodification by market forces. The intense financial reliance on the entertainment industry often leads Black artists to relinquish control over the new meanings assigned both by the market and the wider culture. “I don’t think people have any illusions about what actually happens to their things: to their language, to their books, to their music etcetera. I think there’s a deep, deep vein of cynicism, entirely self-mocking in those things.” But Brand is also quick to acknowledge that there are exceptions. In cases where Black artists resist, the market is helpless. “The market cannot help if some of those expressions leak whole into the culture,” Brand points out. “It cannot suppress all of the meanings of those expressions.”
How can Black people reconcile the rupture from origins and place with the longing to cultivate a sense of belonging in a new land? Brand is suspicious of the “official narrative of nations,” a coercive myth of seamless belonging, advocating instead that the everyday exchange between people is the overlooked dynamic which more readily binds people to a place and to each other. In a relatively new nation such as Canada, hollow reliance on the epic narrative is seductive to ethnic groups who wish to fashion a narrative for themselves. “There’s much talk about belonging…It’s a romantic, sentimentalist kind of talk.” Brand rejects this as a crutch that atrophies the cultural muscles of its victims, while pretending to support them.
“I’m not interested in that sentimentality. I find that sentimentality dangerous because it does lead to the making of very constricted places…It’s not alright to use it as a concept to unify, because the earth is still shaking under this place.”
Outside the door of the room in which we are meeting, a heavy box comes crashing to the ground. The floor shudders under us, almost in confirmation that there is some truth to what she has just said. She laughs.
Brand has successfully charted demanding terrain in **The Map to the Door of No Return**. While she finds in the map no trusty guide, and in the door no clear destination, she invites a very real companion- the reader- on her bittersweet journey. For Brand, her creative explorations are ongoing conversations between herself and the reader.
"I have to juggle, navigate these very difficult conversations and that's OK. I can do that."
